Warning:

Don't Smile Too Much: "A German psychologist has warned 'professional smilers' such as flight attendants and shop assistants that too much forced smiling can cause stress, depression and even heart problems." (Der Spiegel)

***
Last p.m. was 'our' cabaret, in which I was the youngest performer. I'm not sure who was the oldest, but I think it got up there into the '90s.

I was apprehensive, terrified, embarrassed, and the more I felt these feelings, the more annoyed I became with myself.  Completely irrational.  All of my anxieties were on parade this entire week. I woke myself up Tuesday night chewing my fingernails in my sleep.

We did "Happy Days are Here Again" and "Get Happy" and I did "When You're Smiling" as a sing-a-long. It was the indulging of a 'guilty pleasure', some vanity, some silliness. There were the kind of Fellini-esque moments and the odd flashes of mortality and nobility.  The setting and the people made me think of Bergman and Fellini -- lots of red and rose and no windows and elderly and retarded people.  Time stood still and people applauded everything wildly,  good bad and indifferent.  The response was lovely in its unconditionality.  When we did "When You're Smiling" as a sing-a-long,  it was an amazing timeless moment, to sing and to look out at a sea of faces both familiar and un- and to listen to the beauty of all the singing voices,  to look at the faces -- it reminded me of once in a meditation intensive weekend,  I opened my eyes after two hours of meditation and everyone in the room had my face.  I closed my eyes and opened them and the vision remained.  It remained for quite a while.  It wasn't my face as 'me' -- yet it was in a strange way,  it was the sense of being intimately connected to everyone and everything.  The vision didn't last,  but it was a great postcard from outside time.  A reminder of the timeless.


I'm glad it's over and I want to do it again.

After all of this discernment process/goals-and-purposes/gifts and talents exploration I've been involved in, it felt good to do one of the things that makes me feel most alive. I used to love to perform, and I guess that I still do. It doesn't matter  how well executed, how aesthetic, how successful, how profound. I just like to get up in front of people and clown around.

**

Posted by beth

From The Wounded Bird

Blamest Thou Not Me, Blamest Paul (A)

Posted by Grandmère Mimi

Stonehenge Used as Cemetery From the Beginning

At least part of the mystery of Stonehenge may have now been solved: It was from the beginning a monument to the dead.

New radiocarbon dates from human cremation burials among and around the brooding stones on Salisbury Plain in England indicate that the site was used as a cemetery from 3000 B.C. until after the monuments were erected around 2500 B.C., British archaeologists reported Thursday.

What appeared to be the head of a stone mace, a symbol of authority, was found in one grave, the archaeologists said, indicating that this was probably a cemetery for the ruling dynasty responsible for erecting Stonehenge.

“It’s now clear that burials were a major component of Stonehenge in all its main stages,” said Mike Parker Pearson, an archaeologist at the University of Sheffield in England.

IN HER OWN WORLD

In Her Own World

BEACH Lake, Pa.

THE 21st century peels away along the half mile of Mildred’s Lane, a rutted red dirt drive that winds among trees and rocky outcroppings in the hills of northeastern Pennsylvania. The road ends in a turnaround, beyond which stand several wooden buildings of indeterminate age. Even the tousle-haired woman who recently greeted a visitor at the door of the largest one — dressed like Huck Finn in baggy linen pants and blue suspenders — seemed somehow untethered from the present.

The woman, J. Morgan Puett, a fashion designer and artist, is also a kind of radical homesteader, having staked a claim here on land stalked by black bears, deer, coyotes and porcupine. Along with her 8-year-old son, Grey Rabbit, and a changing cast of friends and romantic partners, she has built a home that is an ongoing experiment in art, design and aestheticized living, an artist colony conceived in the communal spirit of 20th-century institutions like Roycroft and Black Mountain College, with her own house, just now being finished, at its heart.

Visiting artists come to collaborate on performances, movies, books and installations; young art interns live out in the woods, in outbuildings and tents. Thanks largely to Ms. Puett’s creative and stylistic vision, Mildred’s Lane, as the property is called, functions “like a good ensemble play,” said Jorge Colombo, a New York-based artist and filmmaker and a frequent visitor.

“Morgan has been making her own world as if the rest of the world didn’t exist,” he added. “She’s designing her own universe, her own lifestyle, with remarkable consistency. Somehow it all works together when people are in that environment.”

Jason Simon, another New York artist and frequent collaborator, praised Ms. Puett’s energy and focus. “She’s voracious — she eats up the whole world,” he said. “I’m jealous of her ability to get so many people to collaborate on her homemaking.”

The largely wooded, 96-acre property is dotted with architectural and landscape installations by visitors and sometime residents: a pavilion by Amy Yoes, a New York artist; an elaborate treehouse made from twigs and branches by Scott Constable, a sculptor and designer based in Oakland, Calif.; a garden designed by Ms. Puett and Mark Dion, Grey Rabbit’s father, in collaboration with a group of Yale art students; an installation by Mr. Dion that appears to be an old cemetery, with granite and marble headstones recording the names of distinguished American naturalists.

The guiding spirit is unmistakably Ms. Puett’s. Between 1985 and 2001, as design, fashion and art shifted from layered and loud to minimalist and neo-modernist, Ms. Puett went against the current in her work, designing seasonal collections and a series of Manhattan stores that shared a rustic, threadbare style and an aura of romantic decay.

Many of her clothes — smock-like dresses, oversized trousers worn with suspenders — were inspired by Amish and Depression-era garments, and her stores, which she designed down to the furnishings, had the same battered rural sensibility, with rusting metal screens, floors made from Georgia clay, old rocking chairs and curtains dipped in beeswax. (Bees and beeswax are recurring themes; her father was a beekeeper in rural Georgia.)

According to Ms. Puett, who is now 51, her signature style was never a simple matter of longing for the past. “It’s not about nostalgia or re-enacting,” she said. “I believe that all of these time periods and histories are pressing in on us at once,” contributing to the complexity of our present and future experience.

“What I’m really interested in is the future and what it looks like,” she said, and “in inventing a future through history and material culture and art.” Above all, she believes in creating and inhabiting environments, including domestic ones, with the same degree of care and engagement that artists typically bring to their studio practice.

She saw new possibilities for doing this in 1997, when she and Mr. Dion, who were living together in TriBeCa, found this piece of land two hours from New York and a few miles from the house in Tyler Hill, Pa., belonging to her brother, Garnett. They were immediately taken, she said, with its rolling hills, streams, ancient stone walls and old farm buildings that had been unoccupied since 1986, when a previous owner died.

The $99,000 asking price was too much for them — Ms. Puett said her business, which she described as “more an ongoing art project,” was not profitable — so they persuaded two artist friends from New York, Renée Green and Nils Norman, to share the cost with them.

The idea was to create a place for themselves and other artists to escape New York, and to “move our art practice into a more interactive arena, where things could happen in collaboration,” Ms. Puett said. “If you’re not doing it with and for your friends,” she added of that practice, “then who are you doing it for?”

Mr. Dion saw it as an experimental place for mingling ideas about architecture and environmental art, “a test zone in a sense,” he said. “All your friends come and make suggestions. It can drive you crazy or it can be an inspiration.”

For the first two years, Ms. Puett and Mr. Dion lived in an old horse shed with a wood stove and no electricity or running water. (Ms. Green and Mr. Norman came to stay only rarely.) From the start, visiting artists came and went, staying in sheds and outbuildings that the couple converted into guest quarters, and in a canvas tent with a plywood floor that they erected.

Meanwhile they started work on the main house, a three-level, barn-like building clad in rough-cut hemlock, which they built from scratch on the foundations of an old chicken coop. The project would take more than 10 years — during which time Ms. Puett gave up her business in New York; Grey Rabbit was born (and so named because “Mark and I wanted it to be an animal but not a predatory one,” she said); and Ms. Puett and Mr. Dion split up — or rather, evolved into best friends who collaborate, Ms. Puett said. She and Grey Rabbit are now the only full-time residents of Mildred’s Lane, though Mr. Dion, who lives part time in New York, still shares the house with them part time.

ALTHOUGH she is best known as a fashion designer, Ms. Puett studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in the 1980s and began her working life as an artist with an architectural bent. “I began to build little sheds, treehouses, forts and outdoor landscape pieces,” she said. “I’ve always had this fantasy of collecting vernacular outbuildings — the hut, the shed, the Thoreau cabin. Those kinds of little dwellings have driven my work. The humble composition is what attracts me.”

Ms. Puett was the amateur architect of the main house, drafting her own plans for its 3,200-square-foot structure. In keeping with her down-to-earth aesthetic, no paint or wallboard was used inside. Doorways have no jambs, and there is no baseboard or trim around the floors or ceilings. Sliding doors are made from horizontal wooden slats, an idea that Ms. Puett borrowed from a barn on the property, and an upstairs porch is screened with the same kind of slatted wood.

The entry side of the house has a sloping shed roof with a rusting steel wall, and interior walls and ceilings are made from blue steel treated with a darkening chemical — “like the kind used in antiquing jewelry,” Ms. Puett said — applied in a drippy, hand-washed style and then sealed with linseed oil. “I’ve always been in love with industrial metal,” she said.

The main staircase is made from the same blackened steel, with steps that float out from a narrow steel beam in random sizes and shapes. Climbing this Seussian structure requires sober concentration.

The house is filled with Ms. Puett’s and Mr. Dion’s eclectic collections of art, antiques, hundreds of books, stuffed birds, skulls, outsider art and ephemera. It’s at once a private, family space and a public, multipurpose environment, as Ms. Puett describes it. “This is not my dream house,” she said. “This was designed as a central community kitchen and reference library.”

A ground-floor room holds her collection of antique textiles and clothing, amassed over a lifetime. She has even kept her junior high cheerleading uniform. “Clothes become part of us and they shouldn’t be stuffed away in an attic,” she said. “They need to be able to breathe.”

Toward the back, in the kitchen and dining area, there are hand-hammered metal tables and chairs covered with old flour sacks. Cowhides have been stitched together as floor coverings. Stacks of antique white china fill the metal shelves and the floors are made from smoothly polished concrete. High narrow windows on either side of this space make it feel like an old church.

Ms. Puett’s vision reaches even into the refrigerator, which she has transformed into a strange, constantly shifting vignette of fresh food, old textiles and unusual scientific vials. “I buy beautiful and grotesque foods and try to put them in a new context,” she said. A broccoli floret sits on an antique candlestick, a pomegranate and brown eggs in a glass vase, carrots in ceramic pots. All liquids are decanted into glass measuring vessels.

“It inspires me to cook an inventive meal,” she said. “You create different games to shop by.” Sometimes, she said, she buys only food that starts with a certain letter: “B” for beef and beets, or “C” for cod and cauliflower. “That’s how you create new problems instead of solving them in order to break old habits and throw things out of equilibrium,” she said. Dinner parties at Mildred’s Lane are surreal affairs, with morsels of food skewered on 18th-century hatpins stuck into plates of moss.

Elsewhere on the property, an old barn has been converted into a performance space and a studio for visiting artists and students. The original 1830’s farmhouse, set against a ridge with a quaint front porch, has been preserved much as Ms. Puett and Mr. Dion found it, 11 years after the death of the property’s previous occupant.

Although they never met that occupant, Mildred Steffens Miller, who was 87 when she died in 1986, they have adopted her as the namesake of their compound. “She was a strong-willed woman who lived alone without running water or electricity,” Ms. Puett said. In her old age, “she walked up and down the lane to go clean other people’s houses.”

At the end of May, Mildred’s Lane is beginning a new phase of its evolution, as an “interdisciplinary art complex” offering up to 16 students at a time the chance to live and work with visiting artists, including Mildred’s Lane regulars Allison Smith, Brian Tolle, Nina Burleigh, Jorge Colombo, Amy Yoes, Moyra Davey and Jason Simon.

“This is a way to formalize what we’ve already been doing and share it with a wider group of people,” Mr. Dion said. (The students will pay $1,500 for a three-week session plus about $1,000 for room and board, though lower fees will be available as part of a work-study program, Ms. Puett said.) To coincide with the new program, Ms. Puett’s Chelsea gallery, Alexander Gray (526 West 26th Street, 212-399-2636, www.alexandergray.com) will mount an exhibition of participating artists’ work beginning June 18.

During the first session, Mr. Dion said, he will work with 10 students on something called “Mildred Archeology,” with the aim of creating the Mildred’s Lane Historical Society and Museum in the old farmhouse, using artworks, photographs, videos and journals made at the compound in the last 10 years, as well as old letters, photographs and ephemera passed to them by Mrs. Miller’s family or found in the farmhouse — where her clothes and furniture were untouched between 1986 and 1997.

Mary Jane Jacob, a professor and executive director of exhibitions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (where Ms. Puett is an adjunct professor), is sending seven of her students to the program this summer: not “to learn how to arrange stuffed birds and dried flowers,” she said, but “to experience how to locate their own creativity and how to live it.”

“Morgan’s great at creative chaos,” Ms. Jacob continued. Mildred’s Lane, she added, picking up on one of Ms. Puett’s favorite themes, is “constantly the swarm — but she’s not necessarily the queen bee.”

“This is where everyone can be creative,” she said.

http://FreeWillAstrology.com

+
 
 
"To live is so startling it leaves 
little time for anything else."

- Emily Dickinson
 
"God speaks to each of us as he makes us, 
then walks with us silently out of the night. 
These are the words we dimly hear: 
You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the 
limits of your longing. 
Embody me."

- Rainer Maria Rilke, * Rilke's Book of Hours: 
Love Poems to God,* 
translated by Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy

Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain

Superhighway to Bliss

JILL BOLTE TAYLOR was a neuroscientist working at Harvard’s brain research center when she experienced nirvana.

But she did it by having a stroke.

On Dec. 10, 1996, Dr. Taylor, then 37, woke up in her apartment near Boston with a piercing pain behind her eye. A blood vessel in her brain had popped. Within minutes, her left lobe — the source of ego, analysis, judgment and context — began to fail her. Oddly, it felt great.

The incessant chatter that normally filled her mind disappeared. Her everyday worries — about a brother with schizophrenia and her high-powered job — untethered themselves from her and slid away.

Her perceptions changed, too. She could see that the atoms and molecules making up her body blended with the space around her; the whole world and the creatures in it were all part of the same magnificent field of shimmering energy.

“My perception of physical boundaries was no longer limited to where my skin met air,” she has written in her memoir, “My Stroke of Insight,” which was just published by Viking.

After experiencing intense pain, she said, her body disconnected from her mind. “I felt like a genie liberated from its bottle,” she wrote in her book. “The energy of my spirit seemed to flow like a great whale gliding through a sea of silent euphoria.”

While her spirit soared, her body struggled to live. She had a clot the size of a golf ball in her head, and without the use of her left hemisphere she lost basic analytical functions like her ability to speak, to understand numbers or letters, and even, at first, to recognize her mother. A friend took her to the hospital. Surgery and eight years of recovery followed.

Her desire to teach others about nirvana, Dr. Taylor said, strongly motivated her to squeeze her spirit back into her body and to get well.

This story is not typical of stroke victims. Left-brain injuries don’t necessarily lead to blissful enlightenment; people sometimes sink into a helplessly moody state: their emotions run riot. Dr. Taylor was also helped because her left hemisphere was not destroyed, and that probably explains how she was able to recover fully.

Today, she says, she is a new person, one who “can step into the consciousness of my right hemisphere” on command and be “one with all that is.”

To her it is not faith, but science. She brings a deep personal understanding to something she long studied: that the two lobes of the brain have very different personalities. Generally, the left brain gives us context, ego, time, logic. The right brain gives us creativity and empathy. For most English-speakers, the left brain, which processes language, is dominant. Dr. Taylor’s insight is that it doesn’t have to be so.

Her message, that people can choose to live a more peaceful, spiritual life by sidestepping their left brain, has resonated widely.

In February, Dr. Taylor spoke at the Technology, Entertainment, Design conference (known as TED), the annual forum for presenting innovative scientific ideas. The result was electric. After her 18-minute address was posted as a video on TED’s Web site, she become a mini-celebrity. More than two million viewers have watched her talk, and about 20,000 more a day continue to do so. An interview with her was also posted on Oprah Winfrey’s Web site, and she was chosen as one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world for 2008.

She also receives more than 100 e-mail messages a day from fans. Some are brain scientists, who are fascinated that one of their own has had a stroke and can now come back and translate the experience in terms they can use. Some are stroke victims or their caregivers who want to share their stories and thank her for her openness.

But many reaching out are spiritual seekers, particularly Buddhists and meditation practitioners, who say her experience confirms their belief that there is an attainable state of joy.

“People are so taken with it,” said Sharon Salzberg, a founder of the Insight Mediation Society in Barre, Mass. “I keep getting that video in e-mail. I must have 100 copies.”

She is excited by Dr. Taylor’s speech because it uses the language of science to describe an occurrence that is normally ethereal. Dr. Taylor shows the less mystically inclined, she said, that this experience of deep contentment “is part of the capacity of the human mind.”

Since the stroke, Dr. Taylor has moved to Bloomington, Ind., an hour from where she was raised in Terre Haute and where her mother, Gladys Gillman Taylor, who nursed her back to health, still lives.

Originally, Dr. Taylor became a brain scientist — she has a Ph.D. in life sciences with a specialty in neuroanatomy — because she has a mentally ill brother who suffers from delusions that he is in direct contact with Jesus. And for her old research lab at Harvard, she continues to speak on behalf of the mentally ill.

But otherwise, she has dialed back her once loaded work schedule. Her house is on a leafy cul-de-sac minutes from Indiana University, which she attended as an undergraduate and where she now teaches at the medical school.

Her foyer is painted a vibrant purple. She greets a stranger at the door with a warm hug. When she talks, her pale blue eyes make extended contact.

Never married, she lives with her dog and two cats. She unselfconsciously calls her mother, 82, her best friend.

She seems bemused but not at all put off by the hundreds who have reached out to her on a spiritual level. Religious ecstatics who claim to see angels have asked her to appear on their radio and television programs.

She has declined these offers. Although her father is an Episcopal minister and she was raised in his church, she cannot be counted among the traditionally faithful. “Religion is a story that the left brain tells the right brain,” she said.

Still, Dr. Taylor says, “nirvana exists right now.”

“There is no doubt that it is a beautiful state and that we can get there,” she said.

That belief has certainly sparked debate. On Web sites like evolvingbeings.com and in Eckhart Tolle discussion groups, people debate whether she is truly enlightened or just physically damaged and confused.

Even her own scientific brethren have wondered.

“When I saw her on the TED video, at first I thought, Oh my god, is she losing it,” said Dr. Francine M. Benes, director of the Harvard Brain Tissue Resource Center, where Dr. Taylor once worked.

Dr. Benes makes clear that she still thinks Dr. Taylor is an extraordinary and competent woman. “It is just that the mystical side was not apparent when she was at Harvard,” Dr. Benes said.

Dr. Taylor makes no excuses or apologies, or even explanations. She says instead that she continues to battle her left brain for the better. She gently offers tips on how it might be done.

“As the child of divorced parents and a mentally ill brother, I was angry,” she said. Now when she feels anger rising, she trumps it with a thought of a person or activity that brings her pleasure. No meditation necessary, she says, just the belief that the left brain can be tamed.

Her newfound connection to other living beings means that she is no longer interested in performing experiments on live rat brains, which she did as a researcher.

She is committed to making time for passions — physical and visual — that she believes exercise her right brain, including water-skiing, guitar playing and stained-glass making. A picture of one of her intricate stained-glass pieces — of a brain — graces the cover of her book.

Karen Armstrong, a religious historian who has written several popular books including one on the Buddha, says there are odd parallels between his story and Dr. Taylor’s.

“Like this lady, he was reluctant to return to this world,” she said. “He wanted to luxuriate in the sense of enlightenment.”

But, she said, “the dynamic of the religious required that he go out into the world and share his sense of compassion.”

And in the end, compassion is why Dr. Taylor says she wrote her memoir. She thinks there is much to be mined from her experience on how brain-trauma patients might best recover and, in fact, she hopes to open a center in Indiana to treat such patients based on those principles.

And then there is the question of world peace. No, Dr. Taylor doesn’t know how to attain that, but she does think the right hemisphere could help. Or as she told the TED conference:

“I believe that the more time we spend choosing to run the deep inner peace circuitry of our right hemispheres, the more peace we will project into the world, and the more peaceful our planet will be.”

It almost seems like science.

****
A friend suffered a brain injury some years ago (an accident in which she suffered a fractured skull.

She was in a coma for several months,  and when she regained consciousness, her left brain had been effectively 'wiped'.  She describes the experience as 'terrifying' but slowly regained her faculties, facilitated by her work as a fine artist and photographer.  

Do these states result purely from brain chemistry?  It depends on how big you see a human being,  how far beyond his current circumstances does he/she extend?   The current chemistry can potentially recreate that greater life that the person somehow knows or remembers.  Somehow we know that we are not just this body, this mind, this person.   That life extends through us,  but does not begin and end with one finite lifespan.

**

          DAILY ROUTINE FOR PEOPLE IN PAIN
*********
YOU CAN STAY ON THIS AS LONG AS YOU WANT
*********

CHROMIUM                100 MCG DAILY WITH MEAL
CO-ENZYME Q-10       30 TO 100  MGS. DAILY WITH                                     MEAL
AMINO ACID
(FULL SPECTRUM)       BETWEEN MEALS FOR                                             BLOOD SUGAR & ENERGY
MULTI-VITAMIN          “DOUBLE DAY” BY SCHIFF                                         VITAMIN CO.
(2 IN THE A.M. /THIS WILL HELP WITH ENERGY,
 BOWELS, CLARITY IN THINKING, AND THE B-VIT.S
 ARE GOOD FOR CALMING NERVE ENDINGS AND
                  ARE BRAIN FOOD.)

CALCIUM/MAGNESIUM-  SCHIFF CO. GEL CAPSULES/ 2 BEDTIME FOR MUSCLE/BONE,  TISSUE REPAIR AND SLEEP.

**********
FOR THREE MONTHS
**********
ACIDOPHILUS/BIFIDOBACTERIA    (POWDER OR CAPSULE FORM)
  (REFRIGERATED BRAND        BETWEEN MEALS, TAKE ONE DAILY
    BETTER)                              (MAY MAKE YOU FEEL A LITTLE ‘OFF’ FOR THE FIRST FEW DAYS BECAUSE
                                                  IT REPLENISHES THE FRIENDLY  BACTERIA IN THE BODY)                                                     
GARLIC CAPSULES        - 3X DAILY WITH MEALS
CAPRYLIC ACID              - 3X DAILY WITH MEALS

***
HELPFUL HINTS
1)  WALKING AND STRETCHING IS VERY IMPORTANT
2)  GRADUALLY-COLDER SHOWERS AND USE ICE PACKS to REDUCE PAIN
     SIGNIFICANTLY.
3)  STAY AWAY FROM WHEAT, FLOUR, DAILY , AND ANY OTHER FOOD THAT
    YOU NOTICE AFFECTS YOU. (ACIDIC FOODS, ETC.)
4)  A CARBOHYDRATE DIET IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED (VEGGIES, RICE,    
     PASTA, FRUIT. FISH & CHICKEN AND NON FATTY MEATS ARE GOOD.
6)  MASSAGE, YOGA, MEDITATION, RELAXATION HELPFUL
7)  USE A NON-ADDICTIVE NASAL SPRAY TO KEEP BREATHING OPEN.

***
RECOMMEND

ELAINE PETRONE

EGOSCUE

***